Google verification in TypePad versus WordPress

Have you heard about Google Webmaster Tools? With Google Webmaster Tools, you can view which of your pages are included in Google’s index, see any errors encountered while crawling your site, find search queries that list your site as a result, find out which sites link to yours, and much more. In order to take full advantage of these tools you must first verify your site with Google, thus asserting ownership of said site. This is done by a) adding meta tags to your blog’s HTML or b) by uploading a certain HTML-file. The former is only possible in Blogger, the latter can be done in TypePad and in WordPress, but how?

TypePad – couldn’t be easier

Uploading an HTML-file is no problem in TypePad. TypePad has a File Manager, which gives you full control of your blogs files and directories, and thus, uploading an extra file is not difficult at all.

WordPress – tricky

According to the WordPress FAQ, the process of verification appears to be straightforward. But why are so many people having problems with it, judging by the questions asked every day in the WordPress Forums, such as this one?

WordPress – how to

Alright, so you followed the steps in the FAQ on how to verify your site with Google and you have then properly verified your site.

Google HTML verification

Here are a couple of options for what to do next:

Exclude from page tabs at top of blog

If you want to exclude your google page from showing up in your page tabs you CAN set it to “Private”, but that’s not a good idea, because, once verified, Google keeps on accessing your site and will report a verification error. You can overcome this by de-Private-ing and re-verifying your page from time to time, but there is an easier way: just make it a sub-page or child page. Does it still work? Yes. Actually, you can make it a child page even before verifying.

Exclude from Pages widget

Making a page a sub or child page will exclude it from the pages tabs, but it will still show in the Pages widget, if you’re using that. Luckily the Pages widget comes with a functionality that allows you to exclude single pages by excluding their page id. How to use the Pages widget is explained in this post.

Use a post, not a page

The WordPress FAQ asks you to use a page, not a post. Does it make a difference? Actually, no. Even if you use a post, and use the Google code as the post title, just as with the page title, the verification still works. The only thing to remember with a posts is that you need to backdate it to before your very first post, so that you will not have some odd post in between your regular post.

Conclusion

Verifying your site with Google is different in WordPress versus TypePad, but neither method is more difficult than the other. With WordPress, however, you do need a few more steps to “hide” the verification file (which in fact is a page or a post) from appearing on your blog. One added plus that should be mentioned here is that with TypePad you can also upload a site map to Google for easier indexing. That is not possible with WordPress. EDIT: It is possible, see comment below.